Why do artists need research?

4.9.2024 0 Tykkää 0 kommenttia

“Artistic research” learning material has been published

Laura Gröndahl

When artistic research surfaces in public discussions, it usually awakes doubts and confusion. Although it has been established as an academic discipline since the late 1900s, nobody beyond the art universities seems to know, what it means, how it is done, by whom – and why would artists need research studies at all? Perhaps they don’t. One can create most impressive, powerful, unique artworks without reading one single theoretical book. An artist must have plenty of demanding skills, know-how and judgment, but they can benefit from them without further explanations. Nor does the audience have to understand the creative backstage processes to enjoy a performance (although they might be interested in them).

One reason to establish artistic research as a scholarly practice is that it already happens anyway in some format and has probably always happened whenever an art maker stops in their daily work to reflect on what they are doing, to experiment with alternative options, or theorize about the effects of their outputs on public. It very often happens in art education, where teachers communicate their tacit, unwritten knowledge through practical exercises, and students try out different ways of painting, dancing, singing – or whatever they are focusing on – and consider critically their outcomes, and then try again. Basically, this is what initiated artist-researchers also do, only more consciously, systematically, transparently and with a clearly articulated relation to pre-existing art theories and traditions. And they communicate their thoughts in public to receive critical feedback from other researchers.

Another motive to do artistic research is to get another perspective into one’s own artistic practice; to see it in a larger context as an integral part of e.g., coeval art movements and their sociohistorical developments, cultural institutions, philosophical discussions or political controversies. A distanced view enables an artist to look critically at the spoken or unspoken conventions and values that they are used to take for granted, including the idea of an individual artist-genius could be the only source of creativity. An outsider’s eye is a precondition for systematic development of any artistic practice: avant-gardist innovations have often been suggested and advanced by people beyond the traditionally established artistic community.  

Research may also teach sound humility, because genuine curiosity brings the researcher to the edge of their skills and knowledge. For example, we keep saying that artistic research takes art as a premise, aim and a range of methods, but so far nobody has been able to explain what ‘art’ fundamentally is. Read more here

We make and receive art, and it has significant bearing on us – and yet we do not know what it is and how it works and why. We only know that it exists as intimate experiences, perceptions, emotions and affects. It is like an alien inside us. We can think with art but never reach explicit knowledge about it, nor through it. This repeating experience of failing to grasp the essence of art may generate another layer of knowing – some artist-researchers call it not-knowing.

Through artistic experiences, we can learn something about ourselves, who we are and what we can do in the world. Trying in vain to grasp the inaccessible being of art as a phenomenon, we can experience the ultimate uncertainty of all human knowledge and put its supposed superiority into proportions. This is especially important in times of crises. When we have to change our habitual mindsets, attitudes and ways of living, we need a better understanding about ourselves and our limitations. Artistic research may give more advanced tools for this kind of explorative artistic processes. Perhaps even more vitally, it can speak for the significance of artistic activities in the society by showing how they happen and why they matter on their own right.

Finally, it must also be also asked, what artistic research cannot do: where are its own limitations? In the competition for funding, the universities are required to produce increasing amounts of quantifiable results and profitable innovations in very short time. To survive in this race, researchers may be tempted to make false promises or give simplistic explanations to complex problems. In worst-case scenarios, artistic research might turn into a kind of quasi-science, where researchers can fabricate their own scholarly microcosm beyond academic rules, trusting only their instincts or subjective experiences. Even if the imagination of an artist has no limits, and anything may be possible within the frame of an artwork, it is a different thing to present them as scholarly research. Neglecting time-consuming academic practices such as fact checking, literature references, source criticism, transparent argumentation or intellectual analysis would bring artistic research alarmingly close to the of post-truth cultural and political practices of the 2020s.

Artistic research is not a magic tool that could save the world only because it rests on artistic activities. Aesthetic experiences do not produce explicit knowledge or measurable results. Their impact is often hard to verify, since it is mostly indirect and happens during a long time. One cannot easily identify causal relations between artistic acts and their suggested consequences. Thus, artistic research is no science, although artists may benefit from scientific knowledge, and scientist can sometimes use creative activities as auxiliary methods in their projects. Artistic research is art in itself – but it is special kind of art, which invites the receiver to consciously think together with artistic processes and thereby understand something that cannot be understood by any other means. This learning material welcomes you to join this never-ending, slow journey of thinking.

Read the Artistic Research web publication here

Artistic Research
Gröndahl, Laura, ed.
Publication Series of the Theatre Academy 80, 2024
Theatre Academy, University of the Arts Helsinki
ISBN: 978-952-353-079-9
ISSN: 2242-6507

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